There are two kinds of marketing – outbound and inbound.

Outbound marketing means pushing your message out there. It means taking your message to the people. This usually involves calling, emailing, doing seminars, advertising and generally pounding the pavement to get leads.

Inbound marketing is most of what we do online. It means creating something that draws prospects to you (in this case, a website). This includes SEO, backlinking, social media, blogging, content marketing, and other strategies that get traffic back to your site and that’s where they find your marketing message.

Which is better?

Outbound marketing is considered the old school approach while inbound is being increasingly used on the Internet. The truth is that the best strategy is to combine both. There are some prospects that are active in seeking the products and services they need while there are those who it’s better to market directly to. Each type of marketing has its own pros and cons.

The Pros and Cons of Outbound

The reason outbound is falling out of favour is that many of its traditional methods don’t work anymore. People are so inundated with junk mail, telemarketing calls, sales pitches and spam email that they just tune it out. People today know how to use the Internet to get the information they need, and that’s why inbound marketing is so popular. However, outbound still works well as long as you do it effectively.

The strength of outbound marketing is its face-to-face, direct contact. It has the human touch. To do outbound marketing, you have to get offline and interact with people, making use of traditional media outlets and PR. When it works, it’s much more powerful than inbound marketing for getting leads.

Another advantage of outbound marketing is that it’s consistent. You won’t see wild ups and downs in your conversion rate. It’s a rate you can set your clock to. While things are constantly changing on the Web (for example, Google’s finicky algorithms), you always know what percentage of your calls will get results.

The Pros and Cons of Inbound

Inbound marketing is great because it’s cheap and easy. You put your content out there and it draws traffic to your site. However, it takes much more creativity than a traditional sales pitch. You have to spend more time creating your content. The goal with content creation for inbound marketing is to inform, entertain and help the reader.

The main problem with inbound marketing is that there’s lots of competition for your target market’s attention. It can be tough to cut through all the noise and static and get a hold of them. There is also a great deal of technological know-how that’s required.

The important thing with all of your marketing is to diversify. Never rely on one method entirely. Try out both inbound and outbound marketing strategies and measure results to see which are working. You’ll quickly see how each speaks to a different segment of the market.

Tony Phelps